The Southern Strategy and Today's GOP

If you were a Democrat and had to defend your party's history of segregation and terrorism, you'd lie about the past too.

by Rod D. Martin
October 31, 2015

Democrats who pretend their party never fought a Civil War to defend slavery or established an Apartheid regime in America for most of a century after that nevertheless love to claim that the Republican Party is made up entirely of their racist cast-offs. They usually attribute this to Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in the 1968 campaign, ignoring that (a) in the years in question, no Republican presidential candidate failed to support civil rights legislation, (b) Nixon himself deliberately expanded it, and (c) the Democrats (in many cases "reformed" Segregationists) continued to hold virtually all offices in the South for 20-30 more years.

No, Kevin Phillips may think that the Southern Strategy was about race, but it was mostly about the Great Society, the hippie insanity of the late Sixties, and afterward the hippie takeover of the national Democratic Party embodied in George McGovern. Jimmy Carter drove the final nail in the coffin, not by being …